David Bowie Became Ziggy Stardust 48 Years Ago This Week: Watch Original Footage

in History, Music | February 12th, 2020

For all the not-quite-believ­able mate­r­i­al in the annals of 1970s rock his­to­ry, is any more dif­fi­cult to accept than the fact that Zig­gy Star­dust first mate­ri­al­ized in the sub­urbs? Specif­i­cal­ly, he mate­ri­al­ized in Tol­worth, greater Lon­don, at the Toby Jug pub, whose sto­ried his­to­ry as a live-music venue also includes per­for­mances by Led Zep­pelin, Fleet­wood Mac, Gen­e­sis, and King Crim­son. There, on the night of Feb­ru­ary 10, 1972, David Bowie — until that point known, to the extent he was known, as the intrigu­ing but not whol­ly uncon­ven­tion­al young rock­er of “Space Odd­i­ty” — took the stage as his androg­y­nous Mar­t­ian alter ego, bedecked in oth­er­world­ly col­ors and act­ing as no rock­er ever had before.

History.com quotes Bowie in an inter­view pub­lished in Melody Mak­er less than three weeks before the Toby Jug show: “I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite fright­en­ing in a way, because I know that when I reach my peak and it’s time for me to be brought down it will be with a bump.”

He was cer­tain­ly right about the first part: while Bowie’s per­for­mance as Zig­gy Star­dust brought him seri­ous atten­tion, the release that sum­mer of his con­cept album The Rise and Fall of Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars would launch him per­ma­nent­ly into the pop­u­lar-cul­ture canon. Lat­er described as “a boot in the col­lec­tive sag­ging den­im behind of hip­pie singer-song­whin­ers,” the album expand­ed the lis­ten­ing pub­lic’s sense of what rock and rock stars could be.

In a sense, Bowie was also cor­rect about the time com­ing for him to be brought down — if “him” means Zig­gy Star­dust, that delib­er­ate­ly doomed cre­ation, his fall fore­told in the title of the very album on which he stars. As we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly post­ed about here on Open Cul­ture, Bowie-as-Zig­gy famous­ly bid the Earth farewell onstage in 1973, not much over a year after his arrival. Of course, what to some looked like the end of Bowie’s career proved to be only the end of one chap­ter: the saga would con­tin­ue in such incar­na­tions as Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and a vari­ety of oth­ers known only as “David Bowie.” But this much-mythol­o­gized and huge­ly influ­en­tial shapeshift­ing all goes back to that Feb­ru­ary night in Tol­worth, real footage of which you can see above. The sound comes spliced in from a dif­fer­ent show, played that same year in San­ta Mon­i­ca — but then, Bowie was about noth­ing if not arti­fice.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

How David Bowie Deliv­ered His Two Most Famous Farewells: As Zig­gy Star­dust in 1973, and at the End of His Life in 2016

Hear Demo Record­ings of David Bowie’s “Zig­gy Star­dust,” “Space Odd­i­ty” & “Changes”

David Bowie Remem­bers His Zig­gy Star­dust Days in Ani­mat­ed Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Experimental Abstract Films of Pioneering American Animator Mary Ellen Bute (1930s-1950s)

in Film | February 12th, 2020

There’s been a lot of talk about the blur­ring of nation­al and lin­guis­tic bound­aries at the Acad­e­my Awards this year. Have we entered a new era of moviemak­ing inter­na­tion­al­ism? “His­to­ry, that nev­er-fail­ing fount of irony,” writes Antho­ny Lane at The New York­er, “may be of assis­tance at this point.” When Louis B. May­er first pro­posed the Acad­e­my in 1927 at the Ambas­sador Hotel in Los Ange­les, it was to be called the Inter­na­tion­al Acad­e­my of Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences. “The word ‘Inter­na­tion­al’ didn’t last long. It smacked of places oth­er than Amer­i­ca, so it had to go.”

As every stu­dent of the medi­um knows, how­ev­er, not only have var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al styles dom­i­nat­ed film since its incep­tion, but so too have var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic languages—among them the pro­duc­tion of abstract “visu­al music” films like those pio­neered by Ger­man-Amer­i­can artist and film­mak­er Oskar Fischinger, who worked on the spe­cial effects for Fritz Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon, cre­at­ed sev­er­al dozen short films, and inspired Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia.

Fischinger’s work also inspired anoth­er, far less famous Amer­i­can film­mak­er, Mary Ellen Bute, a Hous­ton-born, Yale-edu­cat­ed ani­ma­tor and exper­i­men­tal direc­tor who “pro­duced over a dozen short abstract ani­ma­tions between the 1930s to the 1950s,” notes Ubuweb, “set to clas­si­cal music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with col­or­ful forms, ele­gant design and spright­ly, dance-like rhythms.” See sev­er­al of her short films above and below.

Bute col­lab­o­rat­ed with many promi­nent cre­ators, includ­ing com­pos­er Joseph Schillinger, musi­cian and inven­tor Thomas Wil­fred, Leon Theremin, ani­ma­tor and direc­tor Nor­man McLaren, and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ted Nemeth, whom she mar­ried in 1940.

The films in Bute’s See­ing Sound series are “like a mar­riage of high mod­ernism and Mer­rie Melodies”—and the shorts proved so com­pelling they were screened reg­u­lar­ly at Radio City Music Hall in the 1930s.

Like Fischinger’s, her ani­ma­tions spoke a pure­ly abstract lan­guage, though they some­times ges­tured at sto­ry (as in “Spook Sport,” fur­ther down). “We need a new kinet­ic, visu­al art form—one that unites sound, col­or and form,” she told the New York World-Telegram in 1936. She con­ceived of sounds and images as work­ing in har­mo­ny or coun­ter­point, along the same math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples. “I want­ed to manip­u­late light to pro­duce visu­al com­po­si­tions in time con­ti­nu­ity,” Bute wrote in 1954, “much as a musi­cian manip­u­lates sound to pro­duce music.”

The lan­guage of film has nar­rowed con­sid­er­ably in the decades since Bute made her films, it seems, exclud­ing exper­i­ments like visu­al music. In so doing, con­tem­po­rary cinema—with its reliance on nar­ra­tive plot­ting and dia­logue as its cen­tral engines—has exclud­ed a sig­nif­i­cant part of the human expe­ri­ence. In her last film, her only fea­ture, Bute adapt­ed pas­sages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a book that turned lit­er­a­ture into music as Bute had sought to do with film.

She opens her Finnegans Wake with title cards bear­ing quo­ta­tions from Joyce, includ­ing a quote she also used to explain her tran­si­tion from abstract, ani­mat­ed film to a movie with actors and sets: “One great part of every human exis­tence is passed in a state which can­not be ren­dered sen­si­ble by the use of wide-awake lan­guage, cut-and-dry gram­mar and go-ahead plot.” Such mod­ernist abstrac­tion in cin­e­ma, Bute wrote, adds up to more than “nov­el­ty,” a word some­times used to describe her work to the pub­lic. Like Joyce, her use of abstrac­tion, she wrote, “is about the essence of our Being.”

via @reaktorplayer

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

Watch “Bells of Atlantis,” an Exper­i­men­tal Film with Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Music Fea­tur­ing Anaïs Nin (1952)

Watch the Med­i­ta­tive Cinepo­em “H20”: A Land­mark Avant-Garde Art Film from 1929

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Old Book Illustrations: An Online Database Lets You Download Thousands of Illustrations from the 19th & 20th Centuries

in Art, Books | February 11th, 2020

The Gold­en Age of Illus­tra­tion is typ­i­cal­ly dat­ed between 1880 and the ear­ly decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry. This was “a peri­od of unprece­dent­ed excel­lence in book and mag­a­zine illus­tra­tion,” writes Art­cy­clo­pe­dia; the time of artists like John Ten­niel, Beat­rix Pot­ter (below), Arthur Rack­ham, and Aubrey Beard­s­ley. Some of the most promi­nent illus­tra­tors, such as Beard­s­ley and Har­ry Clarke (see one of his Poe illus­tra­tions above), also became inter­na­tion­al­ly known artists in the Art Nou­veau, Arts and Crafts, and Pre-Raphaelite move­ments.

But exten­sive book illus­tra­tion as the pri­ma­ry visu­al cul­ture of print pre­cedes this peri­od by sev­er­al decades. One of the most revered and pro­lif­ic of fine art book illus­tra­tors, Gus­tave Doré, did some of his best work in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Oth­er French illus­tra­tors, such as Alphonse de Neuville and Emile-Antoine Bayard, made impres­sive con­tri­bu­tions in the 1860s and 70s—for exam­ple, to Jules Verne’s lav­ish­ly illus­trat­ed, 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires.

As Col­in Mar­shall wrote in a recent post here, these copi­ous illus­tra­tions (4,000 in all) served more than a just dec­o­ra­tive pur­pose. A less than “ful­ly lit­er­ate pub­lic” ben­e­fit­ed from the pic­ture-book style. So too did read­ers hun­gry for styl­ish visu­al humor, for doc­u­men­tary rep­re­sen­ta­tions of nature, archi­tec­ture, fash­ion, etc., before pho­tog­ra­phy became not only pos­si­ble but also inex­pen­sive to repro­duce. What­ev­er the rea­son, read­ers through­out the nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies would gen­er­al­ly expect their read­ing mate­r­i­al to come with pic­tures, and very fine­ly ren­dered ones at that.

The online data­base Old Book Illus­tra­tions has cat­a­logued thou­sands of these illus­tra­tions, lift­ed from their orig­i­nal con­text and search­able by artist name, source, date, book title, tech­niques, for­mats, pub­lish­ers, sub­ject, etc. “There are also a num­ber of col­lec­tions to browse through,” notes Kot­tke, “and each are tagged with mul­ti­ple key­words.” Not all of the work rep­re­sent­ed here is up to the unique­ly high stan­dards of a Gus­tave Doré (below), Aubrey Beard­s­ley, or John Ten­niel, all of whom, along with hun­dreds of oth­er artists, get their own cat­e­gories. But that’s not entire­ly the point of this library.

Old Book Illus­tra­tions presents itself as a schol­ar­ly resource, includ­ing a dig­i­tized Dic­tio­nary of the Art of Print­ing and short arti­cles on some of the most famous artists and sig­nif­i­cant texts from the peri­od. The site’s pub­lish­ers are also trans­par­ent about their selec­tion process. They are guid­ed by their “rea­sons per­tain­ing to taste, con­sis­ten­cy, and prac­ti­cal­i­ty,” they write. The archive might have broad­ened its focus, but “due to obvi­ous legal restric­tions, [they] had to stay with­in the lim­its of the pub­lic domain.”

Like­wise, they note that the dig­i­tized images on the site have been restored to “make them as close as pos­si­ble to the per­fect print the artist prob­a­bly had in mind when at work.” Vis­i­tors who would pre­fer to see the illus­tra­tions as “time hand­ed them to us” can click on “Raw Scan” to the right of the list of res­o­lu­tion options at the top of each image. (See a processed and unprocessed scan above and below of fash­ion illus­tra­tor and humorist Charles Dana Gib­son’s “over­worked Amer­i­can father” on “his day off in August.”)

All of the images on Old Book Illus­tra­tions are avail­able in high res­o­lu­tion, and the site authors intend to add more arti­cles and to make avail­able in Eng­lish arti­cles on French Roman­ti­cism unavail­able any­where else. “We are not the only image col­lec­tion on the web,” they write, “nei­ther will we ever be the largest one. We hope how­ev­er to be a des­ti­na­tion of choice for vis­i­tors more par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in Vic­to­ri­an and French Roman­tic illus­tra­tions.” They give vis­i­tors who fit that descrip­tion plen­ty of incen­tive to keep com­ing back.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vol­ume Mas­ter­piece, Fea­tur­ing 4,000 Illus­tra­tions: See Them Online

Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Sto­ries (1894)

Har­ry Clarke’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions for Edgar Allan Poe’s Sto­ries (1923)

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Vol­ume Mas­ter­piece, Fea­tur­ing 4,000 Illus­tra­tions: See Them Online

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Illus­tra­tions from the Sovi­et Children’s Book Your Name? Robot, Cre­at­ed by Tarkovsky Art Direc­tor Mikhail Romadin (1979)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When Miles Davis Discovered and Then Channeled the Musical Spirit of Jimi Hendrix

in Music | February 11th, 2020

After the release of Bitch­es Brew in 1970, Colum­bia Records pushed Miles Davis to play a series of dates at the Fill­more West and East sup­port­ing major rock bands like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Grate­ful Dead, and the Steve Miller Band. Miles “went nuts,” Columbia’s Clive Davis lat­er remem­bered. “He told me he had no inter­est in play­ing for ‘those fuck­ing long-haired kids.’”

The reac­tion does not reflect Miles’ atti­tude toward all the music enjoyed by long-haired kids, especially—it should go with­out saying—the psych rock he embraced and trans­formed in the ear­ly sev­en­ties. Miles admired a hand­ful of rock musi­cians, and none more so than Jimi Hen­drix, whom he dis­cov­ered, notes the short excerpt from The Miles Davis Sto­ry above, through gui­tarist John McLaugh­lin.

As McLaugh­lin tells it, Davis was dumb­found­ed when he first saw Hen­drix play on film in D.A. Pennebaker’s doc­u­men­tary Mon­terey Pop. “As the 70s dawned,” Tim Cum­ming writes at The Guardian, Hen­drix had his Band of Gyp­sys, and Davis was in the audi­ence for their leg­endary new-year set at Fill­more East, mar­veling at Machine Gun and the pow­er­ful drum­ming of Bud­dy Miles.”

Miles’ appre­ci­a­tion of Hen­drix, James Brown, and Sly Stone birthed the album Jack John­son in 1971, a “con­cen­trat­ed take on rock and funk that defies cat­e­go­riza­tion.” As you can hear in “Right Off, Pt. 1” above, it was also a return to the blues, a lega­cy he shared with Hen­drix. “Jimi… came from the blues, like me,” Davis wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “We under­stood each oth­er right away because of that. He was a great blues gui­tarist.”

In the year before Hendrix’s death, the two jammed at Davis’ house and planned to record an album, though it nev­er came to pass. The idea remains an impos­si­bly com­pelling musi­cal what-if. (So does the time Hen­drix invit­ed Paul McCart­ney to cre­ate a super group with Miles Davis.) “Some things are sim­ply beyond con­cep­tion,” writes Kol­lib­ri Terre Son­nen­blume in an appre­ci­a­tion of Live-Evil, Miles’ most direct chan­nel­ing of Hen­drix. As Davis him­self lat­er wrote, “By now I was using the wah-wah on my trum­pet all the time so I could get clos­er to that voice Jimi had when he used a wah-wah on his gui­tar.”

Davis “lift­ed musi­cal ele­ments from Hendrix’s oeu­vre,” notes Son­nen­blume, point­ing out the many spe­cif­ic ref­er­ences through­out the album’s four live and four stu­dio tracks. The first song on the album, “Sivad,” kicks things off with an aggres­sive solo almost right off the mark:

First-time lis­ten­ers often mis­tak­en­ly assume they are hear­ing a gui­tar com­ing in at the 49 sec­ond mark, but they’re wrong. That squeal­ing, dis­tort­ed sound, chat­ter­ing with rabid feroc­i­ty, lung­ing like a rabid dog and cir­cling like a dervish – com­plete with what sounds for all the world like a pick-glis­san­do – is com­ing out of Davis’ horn, not McLaughlin’s gui­tar. 

Hendrix’s death upset Miles deeply. “He was so young and had so much ahead of him,” he wrote. It’s hard even to imag­ine what might have lay ahead for both of them in the stu­dio, but Davis’ take on Jim­i’s musi­cal per­son­al­i­ty might give us a good idea of where they were headed—into ter­ri­to­ry far beyond the blues, jazz, rock, world-funk, and any oth­er genre label you might care to name.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hen­drix Invites Paul McCart­ney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

Lis­ten to The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970

When Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man Joined the Grate­ful Dead Onstage for Some Epic Impro­vi­sa­tion­al Jams: Hear a 1993 Record­ing

Jimi Hen­drix Arrives in Lon­don in 1966, Asks to Get Onstage with Cream, and Blows Eric Clap­ton Away: “You Nev­er Told Me He Was That F‑ing Good”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Biodiversity Heritage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illustrations of the Natural World Free to Download

in Archives, Art, Nature | February 11th, 2020

You may have heard of “plant blind­ness,” a con­di­tion defined about 20 years ago that has start­ed to get more press in recent years. As its name sug­gests, it refers to an inabil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy or even notice the many plant species around us in our every­day lives. Some have con­nect­ed it to a poten­tial­ly more wide­spread afflic­tion they call “nature deficit dis­or­der,” which is also just what it sounds like: a set of impair­ments brought on by insuf­fi­cient expo­sure to the nat­ur­al world. One might also draw a line from these con­cepts to our atti­tudes about cli­mate change, or to our ever-less-inter­rupt­ed immer­sion in the dig­i­tal world. But if any part of that dig­i­tal world can open our eyes to nature once again, it’s the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library (present also on Flickr and Insta­gram.)

Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its vast archive of two mil­lion illus­tra­tions of the nat­ur­al world, the BHL has received more cov­er­age this year for the more than 150,000 it’s made avail­able for copy­right-free down­load. Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Hakim Bishara quotes Hen­ry David Thore­au — “We need the ton­ic of wild­ness. We can nev­er get enough of nature” — before writ­ing of how thrilled Thore­au would have been by the exis­tence of such a resource for images of nature.

These images include “ani­mal sketch­es, his­tor­i­cal dia­grams, botan­i­cal stud­ies, and sci­en­tif­ic research col­lect­ed from hun­dreds of thou­sands of jour­nals and libraries across the world,” some dat­ing to the 15th cen­tu­ry. He high­lights “Joseph Wolf’s 19th-cen­tu­ry book Zoo­log­i­cal Sketch­es, con­tain­ing about 100 lith­o­graphs depict­ing wild ani­mals in London’s Regent’s Park” and “water­col­ors depict­ing flow­ers indige­nous to the Hawai­ian islands” as well as “an 1833 DIY Taxidermist’s Man­u­al.”

As Smithsonian.com’s There­sa Machemer notes, “The prac­tice of cre­at­ing detailed illus­tra­tions of flo­ra and fau­na, whether to doc­u­ment an expe­di­tion or a med­ical prac­tice, gained pop­u­lar­i­ty well before pho­tog­ra­phy was up to the task.” Hence such ambi­tious projects as the Unit­ed States gov­ern­men­t’s com­mis­sion­ing, in 1866, of water­col­or paint­ings depict­ing every fruit known to man. But even today, “an illus­tra­tion can offer more clar­i­ty than a pho­to­graph,” as you’ll find when you zoom in on any of the BHL’s high-res­o­lu­tion illus­tra­tions. Accord­ing to the BHL, “a world­wide con­sor­tium of nat­ur­al his­to­ry, botan­i­cal, research, and nation­al libraries,” its mis­sion is to pro­vide “access to the world’s col­lec­tive knowl­edge about bio­di­ver­si­ty,” in order to help researchers “doc­u­ment Earth’s species and under­stand the com­plex­i­ties of swift­ly-chang­ing ecosys­tems in the midst of a major extinc­tion cri­sis and wide­spread cli­mate change.” But by reveal­ing how our pre­de­ces­sors saw nature, it can also help all of us see nature again. Access the illus­tra­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

In 1886, the US Gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sioned 7,500 Water­col­or Paint­ings of Every Known Fruit in the World: Down­load Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

A Shaz­am for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Iden­ti­fy Plants, Ani­mals & Oth­er Denizens of the Nat­ur­al World

New Study: Immers­ing Your­self in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflam­ma­tion & Increase Life Expectan­cy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece, Featuring 4,000 Illustrations: See Them Online

in Art, Books, Sci Fi | February 10th, 2020

Not many read­ers of the 21st cen­tu­ry seek out the work of pop­u­lar writ­ers of the 19th cen­tu­ry, but when they do, they often seek out the work of Jules Verne. Jour­ney to the Cen­ter of the Earth, Twen­ty Thou­sand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days: fair to say that we all know the titles of these fan­tas­ti­cal French tales from the 1860s and 70s, and more than a few of us have actu­al­ly read them. But how many of us know that they all belong to a sin­gle series, the 54-vol­ume Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires, that Verne pub­lished from 1863 until the end of his life? Verne described the pro­jec­t’s goal to an inter­view­er thus: “to con­clude in sto­ry form my whole sur­vey of the world’s sur­face and the heav­ens.”

Verne intend­ed to edu­cate, but at the same time to enter­tain and even artis­ti­cal­ly impress: “My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the uni­verse,” he said. “And I have tried at the same time to real­ize a very high ide­al of beau­ty of style.” This he accom­plished with great suc­cess in a time and place with­out even what we would now con­sid­er a ful­ly lit­er­ate pub­lic.

As philoso­pher Marc Sori­ano writes of the 1860s when Verne began pub­lish­ing, “The dri­ve for lit­er­a­cy in France has been under­way since the Guizot Law of 1833, but there is still much to do. Any well-advised edi­tor must aid his read­ers who have not yet achieved a good read­ing pro­fi­cien­cy.”

Hence the need for illus­tra­tions: beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly and nar­ra­tive­ly faith­ful illus­tra­tions, and above all a great many illus­tra­tions: over 4,000 of them, by the count of Arthur B. Evans in his essay on the series’ artists, “an aver­age of 60+ illus­tra­tions per nov­el, one for every 6–8 pages of text.” Still today, “most mod­ern French reprints of the Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires con­tin­ue to fea­ture their orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions — recap­tur­ing the ‘feel’ of Verne’s socio-his­tor­i­cal milieu and evok­ing that sense of far­away exoti­cism and futur­is­tic awe which the orig­i­nal read­ers once expe­ri­enced from these texts. And yet, to date, the bulk of Vern­ian crit­i­cism has vir­tu­al­ly ignored the cru­cial role played by these illus­tra­tions in Verne’s oeu­vre.”

Evans iden­ti­fies four dif­fer­ent types of illus­tra­tions in the series: “ren­der­ings of the pro­tag­o­nists of the sto­ry — e.g., por­traits like the one of Impey Bar­bi­cane in De la terre à la lune”; “panoram­ic and post­card-like” views of the “exot­ic locales, unusu­al sights, and flo­ra and fau­na which the heroes encounter dur­ing their jour­ney, like the one from Vingt mille lieues sous les mers depict­ing divers walk­ing on the ocean floor”; “doc­u­men­ta­tion­al” illus­tra­tions like “the map of the Polar regions (hand-drawn by Verne him­self) for his 1864 nov­el Les Voy­ages et aven­tures du cap­i­taine Hat­teras”; and por­tay­als of “a spe­cif­ic moment of action in the narrative—e.g., the one from Voy­age au cen­tre de la terre where Prof. Liden­brock, Axel, and Hans are sud­den­ly caught in a light­ning storm on a sub­ter­ranean ocean.”

Verne and his edi­tor Pierre-Jules Het­zel com­mis­sioned these illus­tra­tions from no few­er than eight artists, a group includ­ing Edouard Riou, Alphonse de Neuville, Emile-Antoine Bayard (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), and Léon Benett — all well-known artists in late 19th-cen­tu­ry France, and made even more so by their work in the Voy­ages Extra­or­di­naires. You can browse a com­plete gallery of the series’ orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions here, and if you like, enrich the expe­ri­ence with this exten­sive essay by Ter­ry Har­pold on “read­ing” these images in con­text.

Togeth­er with the sto­ries them­selves, on the back of which Verne remains the most trans­lat­ed sci­ence-fic­tion author of all time, they allow Har­pold to make the cred­i­ble claim that “the tex­tu­al-graph­ic domain con­sti­tut­ed by these objects is unmatched in its breadth and vari­ety; no oth­er cor­pus asso­ci­at­ed with a sin­gle author is com­pa­ra­ble.” Human knowl­edge of the uni­verse has widened and deep­ened since Verne’s day, but for sheer intel­lec­tu­al and adven­tur­ous won­der about what that uni­verse might con­tain, has any writer, from any era or land, out­done him since?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Vivid Illus­tra­tions of Jules Verne’s Around the Moon: The First Seri­ous Works of Space Art (1870)

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Hear Rick Wakeman’s Musi­cal Adap­ta­tion of Jules Verne’s Jour­ney to the Cen­tre of the Earth, “One of Prog Rock’s Crown­ing Achieve­ments”

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Chick Corea (RIP) Offers 16 Pieces of “Cheap But Good Advice for Playing Music in a Group” (1985)

in Music | February 10th, 2020

Jazz instru­men­tal­ists who “play the changes” have learned to make impro­vi­sa­tion look easy. In live per­for­mance, the audi­ence shouldn’t see the years of study and prac­tice behind what Willie Thomas calls at Jazz Every­one, “a sys­tem that com­bines the basic jazz lan­guage with the impor­tant music the­o­ry con­cepts” and at the same time “allows a play­er to focus on how the music fits the tune and not the chord sym­bols and scales that often incum­ber per­for­mance.”

That may seem like a wordy expla­na­tion, but Thomas is care­ful to expli­cate the cliché “play the changes” for max­i­mum mean­ing, draw­ing on over forty years of expe­ri­ence him­self learn­ing the prin­ci­ple as a “use­ful tool for self expres­sion through jazz music.” The idea of play­ing to the tune may seem fun­da­men­tal­ly obvi­ous, but the more one devel­ops as a stu­dent, the far­ther away one can get from lived expe­ri­ence.

How might musi­cians apply ideals about ensem­ble play­ing to actu­al ensem­ble play­ing? For answers to this ques­tion, we might turn to jazz leg­end Chick Corea, mem­ber of Miles Davis’s band dur­ing the path­break­ing In a Silent Way and Bitch­es Brew ses­sions; play­er in and leader of more Gram­my-win­ning ensem­bles than per­haps any­one else (he’s col­lect­ed 23 awards so far); and “one of the jazz world’s most thought­ful and lucid cham­pi­ons.”

This descrip­tion comes from a Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor write-up of Corea’s appear­ance in a two-hour Q&A ses­sion at Berklee Col­lege of Music in 1985, where the pianist and jazz fusion key­board mas­ter had stu­dents pick up the typed hand­out above at the door. He begins with the sim­plest, but most impor­tant advice, “Play only what you hear,” then elab­o­rates in 16 rules which you can read in full below.

Corea’s pri­ma­ry metaphor is architectural—performance, he says, is about cre­at­ing spaces and taste­ful­ly fill­ing them. Doing this well requires seri­ous study and prac­tice. Then it requires remem­ber­ing some basic rules, or Chick Corea’s “Cheap But Good Advice for Play­ing Music in a Group.” My favorite: “always release what­ev­er ten­sion you cre­ate.” Like much of you we find here, it’s good all-around advice for every endeav­or.

1. Play only what you hear.
2. If you don’t hear any­thing, don’t play any­thing.
3. Don’t let your fin­gers and limbs just wander—place these inten­tion­al­ly.
4. Don’t impro­vise on endlessly—play some­thing with inten­tion, devel­op it or not, but then end off, take a break.
5. Leave space—create space—intentionally cre­ate places where you don’t play.
6. Make your sound blend. Lis­ten to your sound and adjust it to the rest of the band and the room.
7. If you play more than one instru­ment at a time—like a drum kit or mul­ti­ple keyboards—make sure that they are bal­anced with one anoth­er.
8. Don’t make any of your music mechan­i­cal­ly or just through pat­terns of habit. Cre­ate each sound, phrase, and piece with choice—deliberately.
9. Guide your choice of what to play by what you like—not by what some­one else will think.
10. Use con­trast and bal­ance the ele­ments: high/low, fast/slow, loud/soft, tense/relaxed, dense/sparse.
11. Play to make the oth­er musi­cians sound good. Play things that will make the over­all music sound good.
12. Play with a relaxed body. Always release what­ev­er ten­sion you cre­ate.
13. Cre­ate space—begin, devel­op, and end phras­es with inten­tion.
14. Nev­er beat or pound your instrument—play it eas­i­ly and grace­ful­ly.
15. Cre­ate space—then place some­thing in it.
16. Use mim­ic­ry sparsely—mostly cre­ate phras­es that con­trast with and devel­op the phras­es of the oth­er play­ers.

via Nate Chi­nen

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thelo­nious Monk’s 25 Tips for Musi­cians (1960)

Wyn­ton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Prac­tice: For Musi­cians, Ath­letes, or Any­one Who Wants to Learn Some­thing New

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Woman Who Invented Rock n’ Roll: An Introduction to Sister Rosetta Tharpe

in History, Music | February 10th, 2020

When peo­ple would ask her about her music, she would say, “Oh, these kids and rock and roll — this is just sped up rhythm and blues. I’ve been doing that for­ev­er.”

- Gayle Wald, author of Shout, Sis­ter, Shout!: The Untold Sto­ry of Rock-and-Roll Trail­blaz­er Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe

What do rock and roll pio­neers Elvis Pres­ley, Chuck Berry, and Lit­tle Richard have in com­mon, besides belong­ing to the inau­gur­al (and all male) class of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees?

They were all deeply influ­enced by Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe, the God­moth­er of Rock and Roll, and the sub­ject of the col­lage-hap­py Poly­phon­ic video essay, above.

(I’d rethink the essay­ist’s choice to obscure Tharpe’s right hand with an unnec­es­sary cut out of a float­ing gui­tar super­im­posed over archival con­cert footage. Here’s an unob­struct­ed view.)

Berry described his career as “one long Roset­ta Tharpe imper­son­ation.”

Pres­ley was cap­ti­vat­ed by her unique gui­tar-pick­ing style, record­ing sev­er­al songs that had been hits for the church-reared Tharpe, includ­ing “Up Above My Head,” “Just A Clos­er Walk With Thee,” “This Train and Down By The River­side.”

And Lit­tle Richard’s first big break at 14 came com­pli­ments of Tharpe, who over­heard him singing some of her gospel tunes, and spon­ta­neous­ly invit­ed him to open for her at the Macon City Audi­to­ri­um.

She was the trail­blaz­ers’ trail blaz­er in ways that go beyond rock and roll:

She was one of the few African-Amer­i­can female per­form­ers to appear on a V‑Disc, a joint effort on the part of the gov­ern­ment and the record indus­try to ship morale-boost­ing 78RPM records to over­seas troops dur­ing World War II.

Her personalized—and self-designed—tour bus was a music indus­try first, ensur­ing that she and her tour­mate (and alleged lover), Marie Knight, would be able to dine and sleep in com­fort as African-Amer­i­cans trav­el­ing dur­ing seg­re­ga­tion.

She hired the all-white, all-male Grand Old Opry stars the Jor­danaires to back her up, a bold move for an artist of col­or in 1938.

Her style, and like­ly per­son­al met­tle, owed a lot to her moth­er, the singing, man­dolin-play­ing evan­ge­list Katie Bell Nubin, who relo­cat­ed from Arkansas to Chica­go, to join a Pen­te­costal con­gre­ga­tion where women were allowed to preach and six-year-old “Rosie” was placed atop the piano, so peo­ple in the back could see her as she per­formed.

After a brief mar­riage to a preach­er, Tharpe hit New York City, where she embarked on a sec­u­lar career, per­form­ing in night­clubs with the likes of Duke Elling­ton and Cab Cal­loway.

The flip side of adu­la­tion by soon-to-be rock and roll greats was rejec­tion by many of the devout Chris­tians who had cel­e­brat­ed her gifts when they were offered up in a pure­ly gospel con­text.

Her fame was eclipsed by the rise of those she’d influ­enced.

The pub­lic may have for­got­ten her for a time, but the star­ry names in her debt did not.

John­ny Cash sin­gled her out as one of his heroes in his 1992 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induc­tion speech.

And three years ago, the God­moth­er of Rock and Roll was final­ly induct­ed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame her­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Hot Gui­tar Solos of Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe, “America’s First Gospel Rock Star”

Revis­it The Life & Music of Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe: ‘The God­moth­er of Rock and Roll’

New Web Project Immor­tal­izes the Over­looked Women Who Helped Cre­ate Rock and Roll in the 1950s

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s com­pa­ny The­ater of the Apes in New York City this March for her book-based vari­ety series, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, and the world pre­miere of Greg Kotis’ new musi­cal, I AM NOBODY. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Free Coloring Books from World-Class Libraries & Museums: Download & Color Hundreds of Free Images

in Art, Coloring Books, Libraries, Museums | February 7th, 2020

There are many roads to well­ness. Med­i­ta­tion, yoga, exer­cise, and healthy diet are all effec­tive ther­a­pies for bring­ing down stress lev­els. But we shouldn’t dis­count an activ­i­ty we once used to while hours away as chil­dren, and that adults by the mil­lions have tak­en to in recent years. Col­or­ing takes us out of our­selves, say experts like Doc­tor of Psy­chi­a­try Scott M. Bea, “it’s very much like a med­i­ta­tive exer­cise.” It relax­es our brain by focus­ing our atten­tion and push­ing dis­tract­ing and dis­turb­ing thoughts to the mar­gins. The low stakes make the activ­i­ty easy and plea­sur­able, qual­i­ties grown-ups don’t get to ascribe to most of what they spend their time doing.

Reduc­ing anx­i­ety is all well and good, but some art and his­to­ry lovers can’t accept just any old mass-mar­ket col­or­ing book. Luck­i­ly, a con­sor­tium of over a hun­dred muse­ums and libraries has giv­en these spe­cial cus­tomers a rea­son to stick with it. Since 2016, the annu­al #Col­or­Our­Col­lec­tions cam­paign, led by the New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine (NYAM), has made avail­able, for free, adult col­or­ing books. The range of images offers some­thing for every­one, from ear­ly mod­ern illus­tra­tions like the cat at the top, from Edward Topsell’s His­to­rie of Foure-Foot­ed Beast­es (1607)—courtesy of Trin­i­ty Hall Cam­bridge; to the poignant cov­er of The Suf­frag­ist, below, from July 1919, a month after U.S. women won the right to the vote (from the Hunt­ing­ton Library, Art Muse­um, and Botan­i­cal Gar­dens).

There are, unsur­pris­ing­ly, copi­ous illus­tra­tions of med­ical pro­ce­dures and anato­my, like that below from the Library at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Barcelona. There are vin­tage adver­tise­ments, “canoe-heavy con­tent” from a Cana­di­an muse­um, as Kather­ine Wu reports at Smith­son­ian, and war posters like that fur­ther down of Admi­ral Chester Nimitz ask­ing for “the stuff” to hit “the spot,” i.e. Tokyo –from the Pritzk­er Mil­i­tary Muse­um. “The only com­mon­al­i­ty shared by the thou­sands of prints and draw­ings avail­able on the NYAM web­site is their black-and-white appear­ance: The pages oth­er­wise span just about every taste and illus­tra­tive predilec­tion a col­or­ing con­nois­seur could con­jure.”

One Twit­ter fan point­ed out that the ini­tia­tive pro­vides “a great way to get to know some of the col­lec­tions held in libraries around the world.” Their enthu­si­asm is catch­ing. But note that few of the insti­tu­tions (see full col­lec­tion here) have uploaded a large quan­ti­ty of col­orable images. Most of the “col­or­ing books” con­sist of only a hand­ful of pages, some only one or two. Tak­en alto­geth­er, how­ev­er, the com­bined strength of one hun­dred insti­tu­tions, over four years (see pre­vi­ous years at the links below), adds up to many hun­dreds of pages of col­or­ing fun and relax­ation. If that’s your thing, start here. If you don’t know if it’s your thing, #Col­or­Our­Col­lec­tions is a free (minus the cost of print­er ink and paper), edu­ca­tion­al way to find out. Grab those crayons, oil pas­tels, col­ored pen­cils, etc. and calm down again the way you did when you were six years old.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Free Col­or­ing Books from World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: The New York Pub­lic Library, Bodleian, Smith­son­ian & More

Free Col­or­ing Books from World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: The Met, New York Pub­lic Library, Smith­son­ian & More

Down­load 150 Free Col­or­ing Books from Great Libraries, Muse­ums & Cul­tur­al Insti­tu­tions: The British Library, Smith­son­ian, Carnegie Hall & More

Down­load Free Col­or­ing Books from 113 Muse­ums

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Daphne Oram Created the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Electronic Music (1957)

in History, Music, Television | February 7th, 2020

To the ques­tion of who cre­at­ed elec­tron­ic music, there can be no one answer. The for­m’s emer­gence took decades, begin­ning with the ear­li­est elec­tron­ic instru­ments in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, devel­op­ing toward the first music pro­duced sole­ly from elec­tron­ic sources in the ear­ly 1950s, and arriv­ing at such artis­tic des­ti­na­tions as Wendy Car­los’ 1968 album Switched-On Bach. Dri­ving this evo­lu­tion­ary process were artists of a vari­ety of nation­al­i­ties and musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties, a group includ­ing sev­er­al espe­cial­ly unig­nor­able fig­ures. Take, for instance, Daphne Oram, the com­pos­er and co-founder of BBC’s sto­ried Radio­phon­ic Work­shop who cre­at­ed the very first piece of elec­tron­ic music ever com­mis­sioned by the net­work.

Oram com­posed that music in 1957, the year before the estab­lish­ment of the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. She did it to score a BBC pro­duc­tion of Jean Girau­doux’s play Amphit­ry­on 38, using an elec­tron­ic sine wave oscil­la­tor, a tape recorder, and a few fil­ters — a syn­the­siz­er, in oth­er words, of her own cre­ation.

Expe­ri­ence had posi­tioned her well to design and com­pose with such a device and the process­es it demand­ed: she grew up study­ing the piano, organ, and com­po­si­tion, and as a teenag­er she’d tak­en a job as a stu­dio engi­neer at the BBC, an envi­ron­ment that gave her access to all the lat­est tech­nolo­gies for cre­at­ing and record­ing sound. Despite hav­ing reject­ed Still Point, an acoustic-elec­tron­ic piece she com­posed for turnta­bles, five micro­phones, and a “dou­ble orches­tra,” the BBC aired Amphit­ry­on 38 with her score full of “sounds unlike any ever heard before.”

That’s how Oram’s music is described in the 1950s tele­vi­sion clip above, a vis­it to the “coun­try stu­dio in Kent” where, “unlike the tra­di­tion­al com­pos­er, she uses no musi­cal instru­ments and no musi­cians.” And indeed, “she needs no con­cert hall or opera house to put on a per­for­mance: she can do it on a tape recorder.” As out­landish as Oram’s set­up might have looked to BBC view­ers at home back then, the nar­ra­tor informs them that “already, elec­tron­ic music is being used in films, tele­vi­sion, and the the­ater,” and that some peo­ple even think her col­lages of unnat­ur­al sounds will be “the music of the future.” Vin­di­cat­ing that notion is the odd famil­iar­i­ty every elec­tron­ic musi­cian today will feel when they watch Oram at work among the devices of her stu­dio, sur­round­ed as they them­selves hap­pi­ly are by those devices’ tech­no­log­i­cal descen­dants.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via reak­tor­play­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

Hear a 20 Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Record­ings by Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Pauline Oliv­eros (RIP)

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

Hear Elec­tron­ic Lady­land, a Mix­tape Fea­tur­ing 55 Tracks from 35 Pio­neer­ing Women in Elec­tron­ic Music

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Syn­the­siz­er and Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach, the “Record of the Decade” (1968)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.